OVERVIEW
Designed to improve the interaction and collaboration of groups and teams, Synergy is a mobile app that works to help produce a combined effect of teamwork, greater than the sum of each team member’s individual work. It was a group project completed during my 2nd year studying Global Business and Digital Arts. Working in a team of students who have gone through our own share of online collaboration, we worked to design a solution for, “how might we create a platform that encourages collaboration and equal work distribution while being user-friendly and accessible?”
PROBLEM
In times when collaboration is occurring more commonly in an online perspective, it’s not always guaranteed to be a pleasant experience. So, our initial question was, “how might we effectively and joyfully collaborate on a creative project in a virtual environment?”. After further research, we discovered that the majority of our target demographic users preferred to use platforms when they are simple to use, accessible for all group members, and have simultaneous collaboration. Their common frustrations included misunderstandings and arguments between group members, no communication or very late replies, one person doing all the work, a negative team attitude, and poor time management.
This research evolved our question to solve, into: “how might we create a platform that encourages collaboration and equal work distribution while being user friendly and accessible?”
USERS & AUDIENCE
students who:
- work on group projects remotely
- are facing the frustrations of remote collaboration
TEAM MEMBERS
Eliza Gill, Brendan James, Hillary Joy, Carter Leung, Elisha Levak, and myself
SHARED RESPONSIBILITIES
- conducting user surveys
- mapping user scenarios
- developing wireframes
- designing the interface and prototype
- testing prototypes
- presenting a pitch of our solution
DURATION
Fall 2020 term, Introduction to User Experience Design, UW
PROCESS
USER RESEARCH
We began by individually completing research in the form of survey questions. This was done to develop an understanding of our target audience, which led to each of us creating a persona.
USER SCENARIO MAPPING
We created a user scenario map together, working remotely but within the same city. We collaborated on Miro and determined 14 steps that a user would go through while working on a creative project online, so we could develop product requirements for our solution. However, we were unclear about the proper user flow and how the steps properly connected together. This caused gaps of understanding as to what features we would require in our product solution. Our product requirements were primarily app pages but there was still unclarity that followed through with us until we built our prototype.
WIREFRAMING
We created a wireframe of our mobile app on Figma from our product requirements, but because of the misunderstandings between team members, we ran into issues as to who was working on what. This caused me and another member to work on the majority of the wireframes. I learned that in the future when working with a team, it is necessary to establish a clear understanding between team members and make sure that everybody is on the same page and knows what they have to do.
PROTOTYPING
We progressed our wireframe to a prototype, on Figma again, and the consequence of our previous miscommunications meant we had numerous variations of the same page created in our prototype. We struggled as a team to decide how we would move forward in fear of being the one who made a bad call or of hurting somebody’s feelings. So, for a while, we did not know what to do with all the variations. Our solution was to assign certain pages to certain people and then have 2 people, myself included, fine-tune the detail, and integrate the feedback we got from usability testing such as unclear call-to-actions. In the end, we developed an interactive prototype.
OUTCOMES
Our solution, the mobile app Synergy, addresses the goals and frustrations of our target customer by focusing on equal participation, effective communication between team members, and individual regulation for organization and productivity.
The features of the Synergy app directly designed to solve users' common problems include a dedicated responsibilities page, an availability page that allows users to see when others are available, a calendar page with both monthly and weekly views, a tasks page with a progress bar, a Pomodoro timer to help with time management and taking breaks, as well as a specially curated music selection for maximized productivity.
TAKEAWAYS
I learned that working within a larger team of six people provides more difficulty in communication than just communicating with one person. Having more minds working together means there is more of a chance of conflicting schedules, as well as conflicting ideas. With that said, I learned that the way to create more effective communication is to divide the tasks so that each member has main responsibilities that are just their own, with other members being able to refine, edit, and provide comments and suggestions afterwards.